Delegates from Nowhere

CNN has a bunch of delegate changes today. This kind of thing really makes me wish they had a specific change log, or that each day I was printing out the state by state totals so I could identify exactly where the changes are. But I haven’t been doing that, so I can just report the changes and speculate.

Hillary must really hate how her week is going. There isn’t even an election this week, but she keeps falling further behind anyway. CNN added 47 more delegates to their counts today. 33 were for Obama, 14 for Clinton. Now, as I said above, I don’t know where exactly they are getting these from. Maybe they just finished a new poll of the superdelegates and this is more superdelegates declaring preferences? Or maybe this is more results from stage 2 or stage 3 of the delegate selection process in the states with multi-stage processes? Or maybe this is just CNN adding official results from states from earlier in February where they only had partial counts before? I dunno. Like I said, this makes me wish I was printing the full stats out each day so I could see exactly where the differences were coming from. There, I printed today’s. Just in case there are more changes before Tuesday’s primaries.

In any case, Obama does widen his lead here. We are now at Obama 51.2%, Clinton 47.8%, Edwards 1.0%. Obama needs 665 more delegates to win. Clinton needs 756. Edwards… well, Edwards could win every delegate still outstanding and it would not be enough. Sorry Edwards.

OK, the Republican side is even more interesting. There is a net gain of only 5 delegates. However, there has also been a redistribution of delegates. Romney LOST 24 delegates today. Presumably this is the result either of second stage caucuses where some Romney supporters from the first round changed their votes and elected non-Romney delegates in round two, or just Romney delegates publicly stating they had changed their preference. As before though, there is no easy way to tell by looking at CNN’s summary page EXACTLY what happened yesterday. In the end though, the result was that Romney lost 24, McCain gained 23, and Huckabee gained 6. This gets Huckabee within spitting distance of overtaking Romney in the delegate count. I’m sure Huckabee really hopes this happens before McCain reaches the magic number, so he can claim that he came in second and then drop out.

Totals at this point… McCain 65.8%, Romney 17.3%, Huckabee 15.8%, Paul 1.1%. McCain needs to get 197 more delegates to finally have the majority of delegates coming into the convention.

There were some vague rumors of Romney jumping back in if the lobbiest affair scandal caused McCain to implode. Yeah, good luck on that Romney.

I must say though, the politics-as-sports junkie in me would be THRILLED if McCain imploded after he got a majority of the delegates, but before the convention… giving the delegates a chance to change their minds and just pick someone else at random. That would be very very cool.